The reason for building a new school was that the current school building is over 70 years old, the building needs to be up to code and the facilities in the building need to be more suited for the number of students and the ways of teaching today. Only 2 science classrooms have labs that are able to hold labs on the regular. The roof is leaking in many places. Many classrooms have acoustics that do not allow teachers to heard easily.

The proposed school will be able to hold 925 students at 85% capacity and 1,088 students at full capacity. This new school will be built on what is now the baseball field and the student parking lot and construction will take 2 to 3 years to complete. The new school has been designed to make sure that every classroom will have access to natural light. The hallways will be smaller allowing for there to be more usable space in the school. The new school will also keep many of the sports fields intact with plans only affecting the current Baseball and moving it to where the upper gym and auditorium are today. Locker rooms for sports will also be better positioned with the corresponding fields for those sports.

The new school that has been chosen will have a budget of $241,714,926 and the towns will only have to pay $176,921,475 dollars. The rest of the money will be coming from the Mass. School Building Association. The towns voted on whether they would allow the school to take out a loan to finance the building and pay it back over 30 years. The $176,921,475 will be split up amongst the towns based on the percentage of students that attended the school in 2022. The following are the amounts that each city will pay:

Bolton(31.87%) – $56,432,052
Stow(35.16%) – $62,258,742
Lancaster(32.97%) – $58,380,851

This will increase the amount of taxes paid by residents in each town by:

Bolton → $1,550 – $1,750
Stow → $1,300 – $1,500
Lancaster → $1,150 – 1,350

Many people have supported the building of a new school but there has been criticism of the design and cost along with how this will affect the staff turnover at the school. However, the NRSC has told voters that the new school will help with attracting the best teachers. They also said that the cost should not go over budget and the design of the school will not become more elaborate.

Either way, some sort of update has to happen to the existing high school because the school is not up to code and is in desperate need of being modernized. And it looks increasingly likely that the plan that has just passed the town meetings will be the plan going forward.